The Art of Letters | Page 7

too close a resemblance to Everyman, but his journey, his adventures and his speech save him from sinking into a pulpit generalization.

III.--THOMAS CAMPION
Thomas Campion is among English poets the perfect minstrel. He takes love as a theme rather than is burned by it. His most charming, if not his most beautiful poem begins: "Hark, all you ladies." He sings of love-making rather than of love. His poetry, like Moore's--though it is infinitely better poetry than Moore's--is the poetry of flirtation. Little is known about his life, but one may infer from his work that his range of amorous experience was rather wide than deep. There is no lady "with two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes" troubling his pages with a constant presence. The Mellea and Caspia--the one too easy of capture, the other too difficult--to whom so many of the Latin epigrams are addressed, are said to have been his chief schoolmistresses in love. But he has buried most of his erotic woes, such as they were, in a dead language. His English poems do not portray him as a man likely to die of love, or even to forget a meal on account of it. His world is a happy land of song, in which ladies all golden in the sunlight succeed one another as in a pageant of beauties. Lesbia, Laura, and Corinna with her lute equally inhabit it. They are all characters in a masque of love, forms and figures in a revel. Their maker is an Epicurean and an enemy to "the sager sort":
My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love, And, though the sager sort our deeps reprove, Let us not weigh them. Heav'n's great lamps do dive Into their west, and straight again revive. But, soon as once is set our little light, Then must we sleep our ever-during night.
Ladies in so bright and insecure a day must not be permitted to "let their lovers moan." If they do, they will incur the just vengeance of the Fairy Queen Proserpina, who will send her attendant fairies to pinch their white hands and pitiless arms. Campion is the Fairy Queen's court poet. He claims all men--perhaps, one ought rather to say all women--as her subjects:
In myrtle arbours on the downs The Fairy Queen Proserpina, This night by moonshine leading merry rounds, Holds a watch with sweet love, Down the dale, up the hill; No plaints or groans may move Their holy vigil.
All you that will hold watch with love, The Fairy Queen Proserpina Will make you fairer than Dione's dove; Roses red, lilies white And the clear damask hue, Shall on your cheeks alight: Love will adorn you.
All you that love, or lov'd before, The Fairy Queen Proserpina Bids you increase that loving humour more: They that have not fed On delight amorous, She vows that they shall lead Apes in Avernus.
It would be folly to call the poem that contains these three verses one of the great English love-songs. It gets no nearer love than a ballet does. There are few lyrics of "delight amorous" in English, however, that can compare with it in exquisite fancy and still more exquisite music.
Campion, at the same time, if he was the poet of the higher flirtation, was no mere amorous jester, as Moore was. His affairs of the heart were also affairs of the imagination. Love may not have transformed the earth for him, as it did Shakespeare and Donne and Browning, but at least it transformed his accents. He sang neither the "De Profundis" of love nor the triumphal ode of love that increases from anniversary to anniversary; but he knew the flying sun and shadow of romantic love, and staged them in music of a delicious sadness, of a fantastic and playful gravity. His poems, regarded as statements of fact, are a little insincere. They are the compliments, not the confessions, of a lover. He exaggerates the burden of his sigh, the incurableness of his wounded heart. But beneath these conventional excesses there is a flow of sincere and beautiful feeling. He may not have been a worshipper, but his admirations were golden. In one or two of his poems, such as:
Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet; Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet,
admiration treads on the heels of worship.
All that I sung still to her praise did tend; Still she was first, still she my song did end--
in these lines we find a note of triumphant fidelity rare in Campion's work. Compared with this, that other song beginning:
Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow, Though thou be black as night, And she made all of light, Yet follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow--
seems but the ultimate perfection among valentines. Others of the songs hesitate between compliment and the